


Look Upward Through a Sky of Salt

by lordnelson100



Series: Breviary: Short Tales [9]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Aman (Tolkien), Aman Isn't For Everyone, Beleriand, Gen, The Valar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-14 20:34:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13015620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lordnelson100/pseuds/lordnelson100
Summary: For the Laiquendi of Beleriand.





	Look Upward Through a Sky of Salt

**Author's Note:**

> From a Tumblr prompt by @arrogantemu:
> 
> 1: I imagine a substantial number of Green-Elves would have refused the summons of Mandos. The woods are their home, they’re not going to leave! If they’d wanted to go to Aman, they’d have gone while living! Also given the sorts of things that haunt Beleriand, they have plenty of good reason not to trust voices in the darkness. Which means:
> 
> 2: There must have been many houseless spirits haunting the woods and the wild places of Beleriand when it was broken and sunk, which means:
> 
> 3: They are now in the ocean? which means:
> 
> 4 and most important: I really want a story of a Numenorean mariner on a night of storm encountering one of the spirits of the Laiquendi of Beleriand, twice-grieved and twice-enraged, having lost their life and their land and now haunting empty waters.

“I would go back.

I died, and by the Short Road came to Mandos, and was thrust forth again. But there is nothing here for me in the West, among these stranger-Elves with their white cities. Where garden walls imprison a cup’s worth of earth, and they think it beauty.

There is nothing here for me among those foreign Powers, the sisters and brothers of the Dark Enemy. 

They left my people to the Hunter in the Dark, long ago in the Days of the Stars. Their love they kept for those tame followers who clung to their hems, and followed them into their pens, to be fed and petted like farm-beasts.

I would return to the forests of Ossiriand.

Beautiful and terrifying were our years in Middle-earth: but free. The tender sky was naked of roofs and never covered away from our eyes. Trees were our halls and our roads and our feasting places. 

When our bodies fell, they were crumbled into the rich soil under the green forest roots, and there, too, our spirits wandered: stripped bare, untrammeled and free, like our bodies when we lived.

I would return. 

But they have broken it, my beautiful Beleriand. Broken it, burned it, drowned it deep. Now the bones of my people are sunk far beneath the waves. There in the salt depths now rot the groves that held their proud, wild spirits, they who would not follow any Masters.

And we Elves of the Forest who have died and fled West must sit here shivering among the fences of the Valar. While they who refused the call to cold Mandos look up at the sky from the dark depths of the seafloor, the starlight refracted through a thousand miles of waves.

What would happen if I died again? If I carried this new body to the shore of Aman, and swam backwards, towards my vanished land, until my limbs could no longer move? Would I sink, sink, sink till once more I rested in my lost home?”

_The Elf who spoke thus to me wandered away down the silver sands, and I never saw him more. And if he ever acted on his thought -- or perhaps, had already done so, and what I met was but an echo -- who can say?_


End file.
